


Mansfield Park

by grapehyasynth



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Mansfield Park (1999)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Jane Austen Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-08-15 12:50:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8057065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapehyasynth/pseuds/grapehyasynth
Summary: At ten, Jemma Simmons is sent away from home to live with her Aunt Norris, whose husband is a parson at Mansfield Park, the estate of the wealthy Fitz family. She finds herself pitied and patronized by all, except for the youngest son, who quickly becomes her closest friend. Together they plan to someday leave all the stately drama behind and start a private investigation agency. But as they grow and encounter such adult concerns as suitors, morality, poverty, and honor, can their friendship withstand it? And is friendship really all that exists between them?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know there are a lot of Austen-esque fics right now for the Rom Com challenge -- please prioritize those! I'm off on an adventure soon that will make updating challenging so I wanted to post what I could before then. 
> 
> Based on the 1999 movie version.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of the characters in Mansfield Park are not nice people so I didn’t want to graft AOS characters on them. Also, Sherlock Holmes stories weren’t published for eighty years after Mansfield Park was, but please ignore this anachronism (among others, lol) because it works really well in the story XD
> 
> Much love to theskyefalls for beta help!

“...She crept across the pine needles, the lantern raised before her, ready to flee or fight at the first glimpse of Tobias. But though she searched the woods til morning’s light, he was nowhere to be found, as if he had melted into the mist.”

Jemma tickled her sister’s arm and Skye dissolved into giggles, the spell of Jemma’s horror tale broken.

“But what happened to him?” Skye demanded, turning over in the bed.

“Jemma! Jemma, he’s here!” 

Jemma, already fully-dressed, clambered out from under the covers and heaved her packed luggage off the bureau. “That’s for you to decide.” As she swept for the door, she dropped a soft kiss on Skye’s forehead.

“Promise you’ll write!” the six-year-old cried, rising onto her knees to watch her sister descend the stairs.

“Every day. I promise,” Jemma assured her.

“Jemma! It’s time to leave, love!”

Her mother met her in the chilly kitchen, the newest baby perched on her hip. “You’re sure you’ve got everything?”

“Everything I own.” Jemma hoisted the single bag.

“Children, get down here!” Mrs. Simmons shouted. “Come see your sister off!”

They ducked outside, where a carriage waited. The sky over the harbor was still the steely grey of just-past-dawn, the ships’ sails freshly unfurled as crews set about the day’s first tasks.

The driver threw Jemma’s bag up on the front seat, where he’d be perched behind the horses, and opened the door for her. “Ready when you are, miss.”

“Take care, my love,” Mrs. Simmons murmured, smoothing Jemma’s hair and leaning down as if she wanted to kiss her like Jemma had done with Skye. The affection felt misplaced on the dingy cobblestone side street and she let it dissolve, settling for adjusting the thin shawl about Jemma’s neck. “Give my sister my best.”

Jemma’s other siblings had crowded into the doorway, Skye at the forefront with tears in her eyes. Jemma could only nod, her previous excitement at this grand adventure suddenly powerfully dimmed at the prospect of separation.

“We’d best be off,” the driver said politely from behind her.

“Yes, of course,” she whispered, and without another look at her family, she ducked into the carriage.

She couldn’t keep herself from twisting to watch her home fade away behind her, Skye running after the carriage until it got too far ahead. But once that was over, once they’d passed out from within the city’s confines, the thrill returned. After all, it wasn’t every day that a ten-year-old with no prospects had her first carriage ride, let alone traveled across the country and into Scotland to stay with her mother’s relatives!

Curiosity and enthusiasm reinvigorated, she folded her hands in her lap and leaned towards the window as far as the seat would allow. England was  _ beautiful _ away from the factories and the poverty - more green than she’d thought existed in the whole world, whatever the books said, farmers trailing along the roadside, birds always overhead.

Grinning to herself, Jemma withdrew the little paper and pen she carried with her always and began to write. Nothing could be more beneficial to a budding novelist than a change of scenery, and this certainly qualified.

She only realized she’d fallen asleep when the carriage halted violently and flung her forward against the seat opposite. She scrambled to right herself before the driver opened the door onto a dark courtyard.

“Have we arrived?” she squeaked, rubbing her eyes. “How long was I asleep?”

“It’s morning, miss.” The driver doffed his cap and frowned at the moon. “Or it shall be shortly.”

Jemma hopped down, not noticing that her dress dipped into the mud between the cobblestones, and looked about her. Even in the eerie half-light of the moon and stars, the estate surrounding her was unlike anything she’d ever imagined, with soaring gables and long windows and little towers that gave the feel of a castle to the whole place.

“Are you sure this is it?” Jemma queried the driver. “I was led to understand my aunt is a parson’s wife.”

The driver shrugged and snapped the door shut, already clambering back up onto his seat. “I was told to drop you at the front of Mansfield Park, miss. This here’s the front. Luck to you, miss, but I’d best be off.”

A moment of clattering hooves and rattling wheels later and Jemma was alone in the strange courtyard with but her bag for company.

Though having only a decade on this earth, Jemma was neither young enough or naive enough to misunderstand why she’d been sent away. Her parents were too burdened by debt and many little mouths, and it had fallen to her, as the oldest child, to come live with near-strangers until fortune allowed them all to reunite once more. She was not being cast away, she was being brave.

Still, dumped as she had been on the doorstep of a silent, unfriendly estate, she certainly  _ felt  _ discarded.

Above her, a door burst open and a man stumbled out in a sudden rush of light onto the little balcony just above the front doors.

Jemma waited a moment for him to notice her, then, deciding propriety needn’t be incompatible with sleeping in a proper bed, she called out, “Excuse me!”

The man leaned heavily over the railing. The way he threw his body about was familiar from the pubs at home: it was the same way sailors would stagger back to their ships after a night of revelry.

“‘Oo are you, then?” the man grunted.

“My name is Jemma Simmons, if you please, and I’m here to see--”

“You’re early,” he interrupted.

“I can see that,” she replied, trying to keep her cool - respect your elders and all that nonsense. “But I was wondering whether I mightn’t come inside anyway.”

“It’s not exactly my job to get you in, is it?”

“I wouldn’t know what your job is, as I have no idea  _ who  _ you are!” Jemma snapped. Weren’t all noble people supposed to be pruned into perfect manners by infancy? Jemma knew only so much of manners as she read in books, and  _ she  _ knew that a proper introduction should’ve been provided several sentences ago. This man was drunk, he was impudent, and she very much wanted to go to bed.

“‘Ang on, I’ll be down in a touch--”

The man wheeled back into the unseen room, but though Jemma waited patiently for him to descend and fling open the doors and finally welcome her into Mansfield Park, she only heard bottles and muffled swearing from above. After a while, the light went out, and still no one came.

Jemma spent her first night at Mansfield Park curled up on the doorstep with the bag of all her worldly belongings as a pillow.

  
  
  


“Miss Simmons!”

Jemma jerked suddenly awake, for the second time in less than a day, to full sunlight and a shadow cast over her.

“Miss Simmons, on your feet this instant.”

“Aunt -- Aunt Norris?” Jemma asked, pushing herself up.  _ Everything  _ hurt. “Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me, child, who else could it be? And don’t put your fist to your eye like that, it’s terribly unladylike.”

If it was unladylike to be tired, they shouldn’t’ve made her sleep outside all night, Jemma thought bitterly, but she held in the comment.

“Come in, we’ll get you settled.”

Aunt Norris, who looked like Jemma’s own mother but with sharper elbows, cleaner clothes, and fewer laugh lines around her mouth, hauled Jemma by a tight grip on her arm over the threshold --  _ Oh, so these doors  _ do  _ open! _ \-- and into a chilly large hall, well-lit through large windows but barren except for several large armchairs and a table.

“Miss Simmons, I presume?”

A man in a luxurious green overcoat rimmed with fur strolled towards her from one of several doorways. Jemma felt suddenly how threadbare her own ratty clothes were, how unkempt her hair must be after the ride and the night on the step. She made to flatten the fly-aways but Aunt Norris grabbed her hand and thrust it forward for the man to shake.

“Sir Thomas,” he introduced himself, inclining his head slightly. “Lord of Mansfield Park.”

“Jemma Simmons, your lordship,” Jemma replied, hoping that was the correct address.

“I trust you had a pleasant journey?”

“Oh yes!” Jemma brightened instantly with memories of the countryside. “I had no idea England was quite so  _ big! _ ”

Sir Thomas laughed. “Well, Scotland has her own beauty and breadth, as I’m sure you’ll discover.” He smiled briefly at her before turning his gaze on Aunt Norris, still hovering at Jemma’s elbow. “If you’ll just take Miss Simmons to the parsonage to get cleaned up before supper--”

“Back -- to the parsonage?” Aunt Norris repeated hesitantly.

“Well, yes, of course, she’ll want to deposit her belongings and move in--”

“Sir Thomas,” Aunt Norris interrupted with a high, false laugh, “there’s been some sort of misunderstanding! My niece is not to stay with Mr. Norris and I at the parsonage! She is to stay with you, here in Mansfield Park.”

Sir Thomas frowned, and Jemma could see herself becoming a point of contention already. She said quickly, “If it’s not too much trouble, I can--”

“Shush!” Aunt Norris snapped, rounding on Jemma so sharply that Jemma jumped back, clutching her bag protectively to her chest. It was like seeing an older, crueler version of her mother snarling down at her. “Wait to speak until you are spoken to.”

“Miss Simmons, will you excuse us?” Sir Thomas said dully.

Aunt Norris frogmarched Jemma across the hall, past the armchairs -- one of which was occupied, she realized with a start -- and through the entryway from which Sir Thomas had emerged. She deposited her in the corridor with a firm nod and returned to the hall, shutting the door behind her.

“ _ Wait to speak until you are spoken to _ ,” Jemma muttered under her breath, rotating on the spot to look at the vaulted ceiling.

Behind her someone giggled, and she finished her pivot to find two young girls, slightly older than herself, on the winding stone steps, peeking out at her from the center column.

Seeing they’d been noticed, the girls smirked at each other and descended the stairs in perfect unison. They were dressed in pretty white frocks, their blonde hair hanging in elegant curls. Jemma stood a little taller, refusing to let the contrast between them and her own appearance wear her already rapidly vanishing self-confidence any thinner.

“Welcome,” the girl on the left said, smiling at Jemma. “I am Mariah Elizabeth Fitz. You may call me Mariah.”

“And I am Julia Frances Fitz. But you may call me Julia.”

“Jemma Simmons,” Jemma mumbled, awkwardly trying to return their perfect curtsies. “No middle name.”

“Enchantée,” Mariah murmured, then with a slight flick of her head she led Julia into the hall from which Jemma herself had so recently been all but banned.

The girls left the door partially ajar, most likely by accident, and Jemma edged slightly closer.

“Ah, girls,” Sir Thomas said, welcoming his daughters. “You’ve met our guest, then? No, she’s not blood of ours, but she is a relative of Miss Norris, and she will be treated as family so long as she remains in our home. She will be like a sister to you and your brothers. We must, of course, prepare ourselves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and a certain vulgarity of manner -- that much is readily apparent. But, so much as you can, avoid arrogance towards her. She is not your equal, but that must never be apparent to her. Understood? Very well. Miss Norris, if you please.”

Jemma tripped backwards away from the door, cheeks burning.  _ Gross ignorance? Vulgarity of manner? _ She glanced down at her roughly clipped nails and the ink smudges on her hands from the notes she’d made in the carriage. Were these really the things that made a person good or ill? They’d never seemed to matter before.

She blinked back tears as Aunt Norris bustled into the corridor. “Come along, child, I’m to take you to your room.”

They hurried through the house, Aunt Norris giving a rushed tour -- “This is Sir Thomas’s study, you must never disturb him at work”; “This is the library” was all she said about the room filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that made Jemma momentarily forget her homesickness and indignation and sense of defeat and want instead to spend eternity there among the tomes -- as they climbed higher and higher.

“You’re just along here,” Aunt Norris said brightly when they’d reached the top floor and the ceiling slanted to a peak so they had to stoop just to pass down the hallway. “Women servants are just to your left, men to the right, and -- here we are.” She threw open a door at the end of the hall. “Formerly belonged to the governess, then it was a nursery -- but now it’s yours.”

Jemma stepped through into a dusty attic space, the furniture all covered in sheets and slightly terrifying headless dolls scattered across the floor. The only blessing was the magnificent view of the grounds extending in every direction.

“Get yourself cleaned up and then come join us for supper,” Aunt Norris commanded.

“Aunt Norris, please!” Jemma called after her, hurrying to the doorway. “How long am I to stay here at Mansfield Park?”

“If all goes well, my dear, forever!” And with what she likely thought was a benevolent smile, Aunt Norris whirled away.

Jemma turned slowly back into what was to be her home. In terms of cleanliness, it  _ did  _ remind her of the little room she’d shared with Skye, but in every other respect it felt every bit as cold and unwelcoming as the family and the entire estate.

After everything, Jemma sank to the floor, her back to one of the cloth-covered shapes, and cried, cried not only for her predicament and the years of loneliness she could foresee ahead of her but also for not being good enough, not being smart enough to help her family out of its predicament, not being worth enough to earn this new family’s respect, not being strong enough to stop crying.

The door creaked and Jemma wiped hurriedly at her cheeks, afraid Aunt Norris had come back to scold her for some imagined slight.

“Oh, don’t do that on my behalf, I’m all for crying.”

Jemma looked up, startled, to find a boy about her age regarding her shyly from the doorway. He shared Julia and Mariah’s curls, though his were untamed and his blue eyes were much kinder. As she looked at him, he ducked his head slightly and edged his way into the room but stayed pressed against the wall well away from her.

“Did you stop to think perhaps I wanted to be alone?” Jemma said harshly. His was the first friendly face she’d seen since she left home, but surely he too would decide her to be unworthy of his time. She’d rather preempt that and just shut him out herself.

“If you do, I’ll go,” the boy said hesitantly, eyes very wide, “but Julia’s just started singing again and this is the only place in the house where you don’t have to hear her screech.”

Jemma laughed despite herself and the boy relaxed instantly into a soft half-smile.

“I’m Fitz,” he added, stepping closer. He slouched a bit, and his lips twitched when he wasn’t talking in a nervous tic that made Jemma somehow more comfortable. “I know, I know, that’s the family name, but -- Leopold’s a name for princes and I’m not a prince and I’d rather be Fitz.” He shrugged, abashed, and looked at the floor.

“I’m Jemma. Jemma Simmons. I think you’re supposed to call me Miss Simmons but I’d much rather you call me Jemma.”

“Jemma,” the boy -- Fitz -- repeated, and he settled to the ground beside her, cross-legged. “It’s very nice to meet you, Jemma.”

Jemma smiled at him, and though the tears were not yet dry on her cheeks, she felt hope flickering again in her chest.  
  
  
  


_ Ten Years Later _

“Fitz, how would one poison a person without making it appear a murder?”

“Is your life with us that dismal, that you are considering killing us all at Sunday dinner?” Fitz asked with a lazy grin as he leafed through Jemma’s largest tome, a collection of Shakespeare’s works. 

“Don’t be crude,” she chided, dropping her pen into the inkstand so she could glare at him properly. “It’s for my story.”

“If one didn’t know you better, one would think you had a darkness in you, Jemma Simmons, always writing these tales of murder and deceit.”

“Then it’s my good fortune that you are so well-acquainted with the effervescent, mild-tempered  _ angel  _ I actually am.” Jemma tilted her head with an insolent smirk.

“Twas only a jest, don’t take it too far the other direction,” Fitz muttered, snapping the book shut and dropping it back onto her bed.

“What is your preoccupation with my genre, anyway?” Jemma added. She leaned back in her chair to watch him as he circled her room, always turning over a little rubber ball in his hands. “Not trying to convert me to  _ romance  _ or something more worthy of my frailty, are you?” She rolled her eyes.

“Never,” he assured her seriously. “Not that you wouldn’t succeed in the genre -- you’d certainly  _ exceed _ it -- but I would never think myself so superior as to seek to influence your artistic choices. Of that, you know infinitely more than I.” They were both silent for a moment as Jemma flushed with pleasure at his unusually frank praise. Then he continued teasingly, “Besides, I know that you know the answer would be rat poison. The anticoagulants are toxic to humans as well as animals.”

Jemma smiled and leaned forward to make a note in her writing. It was true; she’d devoured Fitz’s science lessons faster than he could share them with her. Still, she liked including him in the drafting of her story. 

“If you must know,” she said slowly, “I  _ have  _ thought a great deal about this genre, and if I were a man I might consider abandoning my writing altogether in favor of investigating crimes myself.”

“Why don’t you?”

So typically Fitz, full of belief in the boundlessness of her potential. “I haven’t the money for schooling.”

“If you did, we could be business partners, private detectives like Holmes and Watson.”

“How  _ tawdry _ ,” Jemma breathed, delighted.

“You’d have to dissect the cadavers, though,” Fitz said with distaste, finally coming to a halt before her.

“Not a concern,” Jemma agreed happily. Then-- “Wait just a moment! That would make me Watson!”

“Well, of course,” Fitz said, nonplussed.

“But he’s so  _ short  _ and  _ sensible, _ ” Jemma protested.

“Leaving me to be the arrogant one who’s always a bit of a mess and has no social graces whatsoever?” Fitz prompted.

“Alright, that’s a bit apt,” Jemma admitted.

“Plus, Watson is always writing.”

“But he never gets to be  _ brilliant _ ! It’s always steady, little acts of discovery...” She sighed and threw her hands up in frustration. “Why can’t we both be a little bit Watson and a little bit Holmes?”

“I propose,” Fitz intoned quite seriously, leaning against her desk, “that we stay very much Fitz and Simmons. Someday the world will read of  _ our  _ adventures.”

They shook on it. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Considered calling this fic ManSHIELD Park but I thought that was trying too hard XD


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably won't be able to write any more before I take off tomorrow... I've got my notes and the movie, though, so if you're patient there will eventually be updates. :) Love to all. Thanks again to theskyefalls for beta help!!

_ Dearest Skye, _

_ I have been terribly derelict and forgetful in my letters to you, and though I know I have no right to do so, I hope you will forgive me. Fitz acquired a new horse which he gave to me for my riding pleasure, whenever I wish -- can you imagine? We are out on the land nearly every day as Fitz teaches me to ride, and it leaves me exhausted, without even the energy to tend to my own stories. _

_ Perhaps I can make amends to you with all the latest gossip from Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas and his eldest son, Tom, have quarrelled once more, leading Sir Thomas to drag Tom away to the Caribbean for some very serious business to which the rest of us are not privy. Mariah is engaged to a Mr. Rushworth, a fact approved by all except for Fitz, who finds him dull. Mr. Rushworth’s estate might excuse him from such judgments on the part of the family. Of course, Mariah’s engagement lends a new urgency to Julia’s search for a husband. _

_ Aunt Norris’s husband, our uncle, has died. Fitz and I sought to lead an inquest as to the cause, as a premiere of sorts for our fledgling detective agency, but the prospect was quashed by all parties involved. (As horrid as this sounds, we anxiously await the next intrigue into which we may insert ourselves. I’m sure Sir Thomas finds me a dreadful influence on his son.) Rather than remain alone in the parsonage, Aunt Norris has moved into Mansfield proper. We expect the new tenants of the parsonage -- a minor noble and his sister -- any day. _

Jemma hesitated, her quill hovering above the paper as she reviewed what she’d written. In her last letter, Skye had slyly remarked that “Fitz’s name appears with alarming regularity in your every correspondence, as if it were your favorite word.” At the time she had scoffed, but in looking it over, she  _ did  _ mention Fitz perhaps more frequently than was of interest to an outside party.

She was about to scratch out a few of the sentences, though all seemed necessary, when the door to her room flew open.

“Do you plan to sit inside all day or shall we ride?” Fitz called, already racing back down the hallway.

Jemma was undeniably the fitter of the two of them, so she caught up with him on the third-story landing and checked him with her hip, sending him reeling against the wall while she bounded down the stairs.

“So unladylike!” he teased, careening after her.

“The highest compliment!” She grinned back at him over her shoulder.

...And promptly ran straight into Aunt Norris, who uttered an indignant and still somehow proper squeak.

“Miss Simmons!” Aunt Norris spluttered. “What possible explanation could you have for such unacceptable behavior? And on a day when we are expecting guests?”

“Sorry, Aunt Norris,” Jemma and Fitz muttered in unison, heads bowed in remorse. Jemma peeked at Fitz through her eyelashes and could see he was fighting laughter.

“Incorrigible,” she huffed as she bustled away. “I now completely understand what Sir Thomas was worried about.”

Jemma watched her go, brow slightly furrowed at the last comment, until Fitz jabbed her in the side. “Careful, your face will get stuck that way.”

“Oh, you--” She raced after him as he darted towards the stables. 

  
  
  
  


It was a lush summer afternoon, with light puffs of pollen carried by a refreshing breeze that set the tall grasses to waving. After they had gotten the requisite charging-across-the-meadows out of their systems, they trotted side by side. Fitz watched as Jemma smoothed the mane on her horse.

“What?” she asked, suddenly shy at the way he was regarding her.

“Do you like him?”

“Fitz, he is my refuge,” Jemma gushed, sitting properly upright and shading her eyes so she could look earnestly back at him. “My dearest friend, the best listener -- after you, of course.”

Fitz blushed pleasantly and looked away towards the copse demarcating the farthest edge of his father’s property.

“Besides,” Jemma continued, “all the greatest heroes have horses, do they not? All I must do is acquire a bow and arrow and I am fit to have novels written about me.”

“Are you abandoning our joint enterprise, then?” Fitz demanded with mock-offense.

“Never,” she assured him. “But when we become ensnared in devilish plots, we will need to make hasty escapes on horseback.”

“My father is right, you are a terrible influence,” he chuckled.

Jemma fell silent, twisting the reins in her gloved hands.

“Jemma, I didn’t mean--” Fitz said quickly, guiding his horse with his knees so that he could reach out to touch her elbow. “Do not concern yourself with Sir Thomas’s gravity, Jemma, nor with Aunt Norris’s chidings on his behalf. They both have much to deal with.”

“Such as?” Jemma asked quickly, raising her chin boldly as she looked at him.

Fitz sighed and let his hand drop away. “It is... complex.”

“And I am too simple?”

“ _ Jemma _ ,” he scolded. She ducked her head, instantly sorry for turning her bitterness on Fitz when he alone had stood consistently beside her.

Still, she couldn’t resist adding, “He regrets taking me in, doesn’t he?”    


“You know I do not understand my father’s mind,” Fitz said carefully, “but if he ever seeks to remove you from this house, he will have to send me with you, for that is the only way I will allow it.”

“I think I would’ve left years ago, if not for you,” Jemma murmured. 

“You exaggerate,” Fitz replied immediately, but his cheeks were pink again and he sat a bit too straight in his saddle. “You make your decisions on far more practical considerations. If your family called you home, you would leave immediately, regardless of my presence.”

“I hope someday you will meet them.” She smiled fondly at him despite the pang of homesickness. “Skye especially would approve of you, I am sure. And there we would be free to investigate and speculate and write and be generally incorrigible and immature and everything Sir Thomas detests.”

She expected him to extend the thought as they usually did, to banter effortlessly, but he bowed his head again with a gravity uncommon to him.

“Fitz, what is it?” she prodded gently.

“Your family, from everything you have said of them, sounds lovely, and kind, and forgiving, and mine--” He shook his head. “We Fitzes are a mess, Jemma, and between Sir Thomas’s precarious financial position and Tom’s debauchery, I fear it may someday fall to me to keep everything from disintegrating entirely.”

“You’d be hopeless at that,” Jemma teased, and was gratified when he looked up at her indignantly. “Fitz, you know I will support you in whatever way you need. If we must wait until we are wrinkly old hags before pursuing detective work, so be it. I may have no titles or education or wealth but my best friend informs me I have a sharp wit, so I have great faith whatever troubles arise, we will fix them together. Watson does not abandon Sherlock.”

“He does,” Fitz corrected ruefully, but he smiled at last. “But thankfully the separation never lasts.”

“Only because Sherlock would absolutely fall to bits without Watson,” Jemma said smugly. 

“Oh, and how did that work out for him, when he thought Sherlock was dead?” Fitz snorted. “Man was a mess.”

They rode lazily back to the house, bantering the whole way.   
  
  
  
  


They’d barely returned from the stables and Aunt Norris was just rushing Jemma off to change when the visitors were announced and a stately, striking pair swept into the front hall. 

Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, were impeccably elegant. From their dark, shining curls to the fine cut of their clothing to the calm with which they surveyed the people gathered for their arrival, they made even the stately Fitz sisters sit up straighter and adjust their hems. Jemma, on whom ribbons and silk had never been bestowed, smiled to herself, refreshed to see Mariah and Julia shown up.

“Mr. Crawford, Miss Crawford,” Aunt Norris clucked. She’d taken it upon herself to act as head of the household with Sir Thomas gone. “May I present the family to you --”

As she rattled off introductions, Jemma studied the Crawfords with great interest. She’d never been particularly adept at getting the read of someone, as detective stories called it, and Fitz informed her that would be a necessary skill should they open their investigative operations. Here were two entirely new subjects about whom she had no preconceived notions: what could she discern?

Henry Crawford was arrogant as a peacecock, that much was immediately obvious. After flashing a blinding smile at them all, he plucked at the lace hanging from his cuffs and barely glanced up at Mariah and Julia, even when Aunt Norris pointedly emphasized Julia’s quest for a husband. He clearly spent more time on his personal grooming than Jemma herself did. And worst of all, from Jemma’s perspective, when asked by Mariah’s fiance Mr. Rushworth how he preferred to spend his time, he replied, “Anything which does not present too taxing to the mind.” Fitz had to step discreetly on her shoe to make her stop smirking.

Mary Crawford -- well, there the analysis proved a bit more tricky. She was likewise as well done-up as her brother, but she had a softer edge to her smile and nodded along as each person bowed or curtsied. Of course, the appearance of interest did not necessarily correspond to genuine amiability, as the entire Fitz family, with the exception of Fitz himself, demonstrated, but it boded well.

Jemma had only a moment to consider the disconcerting way Mary’s gaze lingered on Fitz, who felt a sudden need to cough, before Aunt Norris finished dryly, “And that is Jemma Simmons. She is just a poor relation, practically a visitor, whom Sir Thomas was so good as to take in.”

The others began to play at cards with the Crawfords, but Jemma suddenly felt significantly less high-spirited. She slumped in an armchair with a book and attempted to read but didn’t turn the page once, focusing her gaze just over the top of the book to continue studying the interactions.

“But did you see the way Mariah looked at him?” she nonetheless gushed to Fitz an hour later as they climbed the stairs to her room in the attic.

“Mariah is engaged, Jemma,” he chided.

“Engaged or not, he has bewitched her,” she chuckled. Realizing he was no longer beside her, she turned to see he had stopped below and was gazing out a narrow window.

She hopped back down to his side and leaned her chin on his shoulder to follow his line of sight.

Henry and Mary Crawford were wandering, arm-in-arm, through the grounds of Mansfield Park on their way back to the parsonage. Even from here it was apparent that Mary’s posture was flawless.

“And what do you think of the Crawfords?” she asked, stepping away from him. 

“She is delightful,” Fitz whispered, then added quickly, “They are both delightful.”

Privately, Jemma thought they were all fluff and no substance, the exact opposite of the type of person (real or fictional) to whom Fitz was usually drawn. Normally he was exceptionally picky with his approval and she opened her mouth to tease him, but when he turned to her his eyes were eager and she thought of Sherlock and Watson and broken friendships and she decided her opinion on this matter may be irrelevant. After all, as Fitz always said, she wasn’t the best judge of character. 

  
  
  


She felt something akin to regret for staying silent several days later when, bounding down the stairs to locate Fitz for their afternoon ride, she heard laughter from the courtyard and skidded to a halt.

Outside, Mary Crawford sat (side-saddle, of all things) precariously atop the horse Jemma always rode as Fitz guided her carefully in tiny loops.

As she watched, the horse tossed its head quite suddenly and Mary shrieked, slipping off the saddle and into Fitz’s waiting arms. He steadied them both and Mary laughed even as she clutched his shoulders too tightly.

Jemma withdrew quickly back to her room, feeling inexplicably stung by the whole scene. Not that they’d ever explicitly discussed whether the horse was Jemma’s and Jemma’s alone, though she’d thought Fitz had intended it as a gift for her. And not that she would ever forbade him from spending time with other people. Of course he should have other friends! Only... that had never happened before, and Jemma wasn’t quite sure how she felt about sharing his company.

She sat down to write a letter to Skye but could only recall the grim things that had happened of late and none of the cheery. She turned to her latest story but found her fictional friends, too, had abandoned her.

Fitting, wasn’t it, that the interloper in Sherlock and Watson’s close friendship was  _ also  _ named Mary.   
  
  
  
  


Nearly half a year after Sir Thomas and Tom had sailed for the Caribbean, tea-time was interrupted by Tom and his friend, a Mr. John Yates, who caroused straight through the salon in their muddy boots, singing a drinking song, with not a glance at those gathered there.

“Was that--” Mary Crawford, a near-constant visitor to Mansfield Park these days, asked delicately.

“My brother, yes,” Fitz said darkly.

“Tom!  _ Tom _ !” Aunt Norris hissed as the young men stumbled back into the room, leaning on each other for support as they laughed raucously. “You are supposed to be in the Caribbean!”

“Am I not?” Tom chortled, wiping tears from his eyes. “Is this not the sunny beach where last I woke? But alas -- you are not the fair maidens I was wooing. Whereas  _ you _ \--”

His gaze had fallen on Mary. Fitz’s head whipped a bit too quickly to her for her reaction, but she just scowled, unimpressed by Tom’s wiggling eyebrows.

Tom had changed not a bit since he’d first accosted Jemma, quite unhelpfully, on the night of her arrival at Mansfield Park. He was still a reveler, still an alcoholic, and still, unfortunately, a charmer. Though everyone could see he would ruin the family before long, they seemed incapable of denying his every whim.

“Tom, where is Father?” Fitz asked stiffly. In the interlude of Sir Thomas’s absence, and with Jemma’s encouragement after he’d expressed his concerns to her, he’d done his utmost to act as the man of the manor, to uphold financial stability and moral rectitude where his sisters and Jemma’s Aunt were determinedly more lax. The effort was driving him half-mad -- Jemma knew better than anyone how much more Fitz would rather barricade himself somewhere with a book or a science experiment -- but he was bearing it with respectably little griping. And, as an insider, Jemma was privy to those gripes, whereas Mary Crawford was not. Not that that mattered. At all.

“Still in Antigua,” Tom said dismissively, releasing Yates and sinking into the chair beside Mr. Rushworth. “It was a touch too boring for me, so I returned.”

“Dug him up in London,” Yates explained. “Found him face-first in a pitcher, and--”

“You know,” Tom interrupted, leaning forward with sudden enthusiasm, and there again was that captivating  _ something  _ about him that made his sisters, Aunt Norris, and even both the Crawfords take notice. “They’re staging the most amusing play in London at the moment.  _ The Lover’s Vow _ .”

Fitz snorted.

“You’ve heard of it!” Yates laughed.

“Of course I’ve heard of it.” Fitz looked around nervously as suddenly all attention was upon him. “It’s rubbish, Tom.”

“Well, I think we should put on our own production here,” Tom announced, unfazed.

Jemma could see Fitz warring with himself as everyone else expressed delight, carried away with Tom’s plan.

“I don’t think we should do that,” Fitz muttered.

“And when did you become a Puritan?” Tom looked around at the others with a benevolent smile. “My little brother, ladies and gentlemen. Brilliant, to be certain, but I couldn’t expect him to understand the value of the sorts of stories told in  _ The Lover’s Vow _ , given that he’s a virgin.”

“That’s not--” Fitz was bright red, his hands in fists, fighting to remain in his seat. “You say that like it’s a bad thing--”

But there were titters around the room and Fitz glanced anxiously at Mary Crawford. Jemma could see the sum of it all at once.

“What do you think, Miss Simmons?”

She looked up with a start to find Henry Crawford watching her. His steady gaze unnerved her -- had his eyelashes always been quite so long?

Jemma, too, had heard of  _ The Lover’s Vow _ . She hadn’t read it herself, and she’d rather wait to reserve judgment until she’d either consumed the script or seen a performance, but she did trust Fitz’s assessment. Though of late, even that had seemed skewed.

“I am sorry to disappoint you, but I do not have a ready opinion,” she answered at last, deciding to avoid offending anyone.

“I suspect you’re almost entirely composed of ready opinions,” Henry shot back, almost... flirtatiously?

Jemma opened her mouth, having settled upon making a more decisive retort this time, when Aunt Norris interrupted.

“Jemma, I believe the setting hasn’t been cleared from the dining room yet. Would you run along and take care of that?”

And there it was. A reminder that no matter how many years she spent in this house she would never be at home, and no matter how she strived to hold her own among these people, she would never belong. She was no more than a servant.

No wonder Fitz preferred Mary Crawford’s company to her own.

She fought to keep her head high as she stalked from the room, despite the heavy weight of indignity, but there was a ringing in her ears and her whole body felt flushed.

As soon as she passed through the doors she broke into silent sobs and ran up the stairs, so quickly that she didn’t hear Fitz demand with uncharacteristic ferocity behind her, “Really, Aunt Norris? The setting couldn’t wait?” 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm minorly depressed in general right now and not inspired by the way I'm writing this story (I think it's better viewed than written but oh well) but I'm gonna keep working on it so hopefully it's not totally a waste of time for y'all to read! Gonna do some drabbles for a few days after this then work on my Long Distance fic.

“Everything we’ve worked for, every ounce of credibility we’ve attempted to restore to my father’s estate, swept away the moment Tom returns,” Fitz grumbled from where he laid sprawled across Jemma’s bed. (It was entirely improper, but no one ever came up to her room anyway.)

“Times change, Fitz,” she murmured, not looking up from her latest letter to Skye. For nearly two hours now he’d been rehashing his arguments against the proposed performance, hardly noticing her lack of contribution. “Perhaps this would do the family some good, to shake away the cobwebs. Goodness knows your family is entrenched in too many other old ways.”

“Either way I’m doomed,” Fitz pronounced moodily, and Jemma was reminded that however much he spoke of the ‘prospects of the estate’ or the ‘burden of responsibility’ he was still hardly out of adolescence. She peeked over at him fondly, the way his lower lip protruded slightly and one forefinger kept flicking the nearest window dressing. “Either Sir Thomas returns to find it a success and bestows his gratitude on Tom, or he returns to find us in disgrace and blames me for not keeping everyone in line.”

Fitz’s relationship with his father was a touchy subject, so she tried a different tack. “They’ll put the play on with or without your blessing,” Jemma sighed. “You could at least try to control the damage.”  

“Are you going to join, then?” he asked, restless eyes settling on her.

“Hmm, I’m not sure I’m welcome.” She kept her voice even but the corners of her eyes burned with the relived shame from earlier.

“Jem—“

The door to her room burst open and Fitz sat up hurriedly; too late to leave Jemma’s bed entirely, he sat at the foot nearest to her desk and leaned over as if he’d been reading her letter.

“Miss Simmons, you simply _must_ help me rehearse my lines, the men are all intolerably absorbed in their own roles and I – oh, Mr. Fitz!” Mary took a step back, holding her script against her slightly heaving breast as she took them in. “I’m sorry, am I interrupting something?”

“Not at all, please come in, Mary,” Jemma said coolly. “We were just discussing the play.”

“Oh, I _do_ wish you would both consent to participate,” Mary sighed dramatically, sweeping over and lacing an arm over Jemma’s shoulder. “As it is, my brother will be playing at least three roles, one of which is as my _lover_ , perish the thought – it’d be like the two of you acting as lovers!” she tittered.

“Yes, quite,” Jemma murmured.

“Mr. Fitz – _Leopold_ ,” Mary amended in a slight purr, “Are you _certain_ we cannot coax you to take that role from him?”

“ _Very_ certain.”

“And you, dear Miss Simmons – you’d be just _perfect_ for my character’s younger sister – why, Henry was saying what an _honor_ it would be to play opposite someone with your beauty and grace--”

“Was he?” Jemma asked drily, an eyebrow arched in disbelief, but Fitz coughed loudly and cut her off. “On second thought, Miss Crawford, perhaps it’s best that I involve myself. To, uh –“ He glanced at Jemma. “Minimize the damage, as it were.”

“Oh how _delightful_.” As Mary’s hand left her shoulder and instead took Fitz’s arm, Jemma got a queasy feeling that perhaps this had been her original intent all along. “You’ll need to pretend like you find me attractive but I’m sure we can muddle something together.”

As Fitz trailed Mary from the room with something of a dopey expression, Jemma sighed and crumpled up her letter, which suddenly seemed dull and full of affectation to her. “All men are weak,” she muttered savagely.

 

 

 

In the coming days, Jemma watched the preparations for the stage production with increasing foreboding. Every rehearsal was accompanied by pitchers of wine; the players bandied about the set dressings like horny teenagers raised by the docks. Even Fitz, apparently enchanted by Mary’s wiles, abandoned simultaneously his previous protestations and his duties at the estate, leaving visits to tenant farmers uncompleted and letters unopened in the front hall. Jemma spent most days out in the fields, trotting aimlessly or reading with a picnic lunch, to avoid the general lawlessness descending on Mansfield Park.

It wasn’t the lawlessness, per se, that irked her. She remembered well the mayhem of the home of her youth, the constant clamor and children running about and drunken men stumbling out of pubs at any hour of the day. But that had been a wholesome lawlessness, as much as it could be. It had been plain and honest and full of a general cheer and fervor. Here at Mansfield, everyone seemed to be seeking to – literally and figuratively – upstage one another, to curry favor through manipulation and false niceties. Fitz, so long dependable for his bluntness and lack of verbal finesse, had been sucked into the whole affair with them. Of course, she couldn’t blame him for that: the boy had no experience with pretty women batting their eyelashes at him. If anything, Jemma felt like she herself was to blame, though she wasn’t quite sure why.

It all came to an abrupt head when, on the evening of the planned play, Jemma was descending the stairs for supper and stumbled straight into Sir Thomas, just removing his coat in the front hall.

“Sir Thomas!” she exclaimed, as loudly as she could, both to mask the sounds of the preparations in the rest of the house and in hopes of alerting the guilty parties. “We weren’t expecting you!”

“Were you not?” he chuckled with a calm she’d never seen from him before. “I sent a letter two weeks ago. But never mind that, my dear, it is such a joy to see you once more. You are looking more beautiful than ever.”

It was a compliment, she knew, but as he embraced her she felt dirty, like somehow passing into Sir Thomas’s good graces through something so superficial – or passing into his good graces at all – somehow lessened her esteem of herself.

“Now, what _is_ all that hullabaloo?” he mused, and he released her to follow the sounds of the play.

He couldn’t have come at a worse time. An hour later, perhaps, partway through the first act, they could’ve claimed some scholarly worth to their proceedings. Now, though, Mr. Rushworth was red in the face from drink, Mariah’s gown was down one shoulder as Henry Crawford whispered scandalously into her ear, Julia was riding a fake horse, and Fitz – poor Fitz – was caught behind Mary, helping to do up the ribbons on the back of her costume.

Everything ground to a stop as Sir Thomas entered the room. Jemma, once again belonging to neither side and yet feeling responsible for both, ducked her head and left just as he began shouting.

 

 

 

 

Solemnity and decorum returned to Mansfield the next day. Tom and his friend Yates left for London; Henry Crawford, escaping most of the blame for the frivolous production, wormed his way into Sir Thomas’s good graces and spurned Mariah’s continuous attempts at flirtation. It was almost as if nothing had changed – except, perhaps, Jemma’s new status as favorite in Sir Thomas’s eyes. A position with which no one was less comfortable than Jemma herself.

A steady drizzle kept them inside for most of the day, and they all gathered in the sitting room in the afternoon for tea. Jemma entered with a tray of cups and spoons just as Sir Thomas was saying, “Of course, two mulattoes can never have children. They are like mules in that sense.”

Jemma nearly dropped the tray. Fitz, sitting on a small couch with Mary, put out a hand to steady her. She turned her head and murmured, “Fitz, that… _complicated business_ in Antigua, the affairs you said I wouldn’t understand – they weren’t, by any chance, to do with slavery, were they?”

He ducked his head, abashed. Not mollified in the slightest, Jemma rammed her foot against his as she set the place settings on the table.

“Father,” Fitz squeaked, moving his foot out of her reach, “that’s scientifically inaccurate. And also rude.”

“Boy, when you’ve spent some time with them, you’ll understand,” Sir Thomas chortled. Jemma thought she might be sick. “And as it were, I’m thinking about bringing one of them back from our properties in Antigua. It would add a little something to the estate, don’t you think?”

Jemma set the teapot back down with a clatter. “I have read that if you were to bring a slave back to Britain, there is some argument that they should be considered a free person. If – if I’m not mistaken,” she added, with faked modesty, to brunt the force of the impropriety.

To her surprise, Sir Thomas didn’t seem offended. In fact, he didn’t seem affected at all. Instead he laughed and caught her wrist, tugging her slightly towards him. “You’ve changed, Miss Simmons, more than I realized.”

“I’ve done some reading, sir, with Fitz’s advisement—“

“She has a vivacious mind, and her talent for writing is remarkable,” Fitz said quietly. Jemma knew he was partially attempting to rectify the damage done by his keeping his father’s slave holdings a secret, but the compliment still sent a warm, woozy rush through her face and stomach. She cast him a sidelong glance of gratitude.

Sir Thomas heard none of it. As if neither of them had spoken, he noted, “Your complexion is much improved.”

“I trust in time you will see as much beauty of mind,” Jemma persisted.

“If anyone deserves to be at the university, it is Miss Simmons, not I,” Fitz concurred.

“And your figure,” Sir Thomas continued.

“Excuse me,” Jemma whispered, trying to wrench free of his grip, skin crawling with discomfort.

“Don’t you agree, Mr. Crawford?” Sir Thomas called.

Henry looked up from the other side of the room. “Indeed, there’s a certain… _purity_ to Miss Simmons. A righteousness that shines through to illuminate her eyes and her whole being.”

“Boys, stop mocking her, can’t you see she’s uncomfortable?” Mary cried. Jemma looked to her thankfully, just in time to see Fitz lay a gentle hand on Mary’s.

“I have it!” Sir Thomas exclaimed. “We shall have a ball, here at Mansfield Park, in honor of Miss Simmons. We shall bring her out, introduce her to society. Surely some young men will take notice.”

“Indeed,” Henry murmured, prowling to stand behind Sir Thomas’s chair so they both regarded her like vultures. “Some will notice.”

For years Jemma had craved the approval of the Fitzes, had wanted nothing more than to feel loved and included and respected in their home, had fought her better instincts and her indignation at their general morality in hopes that in time they could find common ground. How bitter it was, then, to have it offered and find it a hollow, cruel trick.

“Excuse me,” she repeated, this time tearfully, and fled the room.

Fitz caught up to her in the stables, where she was wrestling a saddle onto her horse.

“Are you mad?” he shouted over the rain thundering on the roof and the paths outside. “It’s pouring, you’ll catch cold—“

“I think more clearly for the rain,” she shot back, nudging him out of the way – ignoring his plastered hair, the steam rising from his body – as she walked towards the doorway.

“It’s just a silly ball,” Fitz pleaded.

“I’ll not be _sold_ like one of your father’s slaves!” Jemma spat, turning on him all the anger she felt at the whole lot of them, at Fitz for his obeisance, at herself for her blindness and her stupid affection for her best friend. If not for him, maybe she _would_ have left long ago. “I’d rather live in poverty. I wish I’d never come to Mansfield.”

“Jemma, you don’t – you don’t mean that,” Fitz stuttered, visibly wounded. “You’re being irrational.”

“But irrationality is a great _enhancement_ to a woman’s chance!” She swung up on the horse, not bothering to keep her dress from flicking Fitz across the face.

“You’re not being sensible – if you’ll just let me –“

She sped out thunderously, not able to stay and listen to his entreaties which would no doubt touch her heart and mind equally and make her feel mollified.

Fitz watched her disappear into the darkness of the storm, knowing better than to follow, and whispered after her, “You really must harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.”

 

 

Several anxious hours later, Fitz stood at the sitting room window and watched as Jemma led her horse in. She looked pale and sodden to the bone, but there was a relaxation to her shoulders that he knew only came from being out on the grounds. From being away from him and his family.

“You could do worse, son,” Sir Thomas said, coming up beside him.

Fitz cleared his throat, looking away from Jemma with an inexcusable blush. “Sir?”

“She is witty and bright and not without worth.”

“And how _exactly_ do you measure worth, Father?” Fitz didn’t bother restraining his disbelief.

“Do not impress me with your purity, boy. You know that the match will benefit everyone. The family is established and well-known—“

“The Simmonses?” Fitz interrupted.

Sir Thomas turned to look at him gravely, and Fitz realized with an uncomfortable dropping-out of his stomach that he’d shown his hand.

“The _Crawfords_ , boy.”

“Of course,” Fitz murmured. “The Crawfords.”

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

_Dear Skye –_

_How quickly affairs evolve here at Mansfield. It makes one long for the steady drudgery of life at home. (Tell me there remains steady drudgery, boring you always to tears? If that, too, has changed, I will no longer know what sense to make of this world.)_

_Against all reason, Henry Crawford seems to have taken a particular interest in me. He follows me about like a shadow, appearing wherever I am with uncanny reliability. Just this morning, as I sought the respite and stillness of the library, he entered and affected as if he’d come to peruse the tomes, rather than to bother me. He asked to read aloud to me, and naturally propriety required me to acquiesce. The whole thing was far more intimate than I’d prefer. This is not to say that I am uncomfortable with male attention: it makes something of a welcome change, after years of invisibility beside Mariah and Julia. And Mr. Crawford does have a pleasing visage and steady voice. But there remains something lacking._

_On the subject of Mariah, she has decided her marriage will be held in a fortnight, and that Julia shall accompany her and Mr. Rushworth on their honeymoon. Sir Thomas’s presentation of these rapid changes was conducted with utmost precision, as if the ideas had been his own, but it’s clear – to me, at least – why the timeline has shifted: hatred of home (understandable), the misery of her disappointed affections towards Mr. Crawford (all the more bitter, now that he has turned his attention to me), and growing distaste for her husband-to-be._

_Shortly after the wedding there is to be a ball, for me! Can you imagine? I confess my feelings are all muddled about it. I am only grateful that Mariah, Julia, and Rushworth will by that time have departed, diminishing the audience for what could be a true disaster. Await my next letter breathlessly, dear sister, and you shall be rewarded with all the sordid details._

_Love, Jemma_

_P.S. Fitz says hello. I find he does not feature at all in this letter – analyze THAT!_

Jemma hurried down the lane, quickly growing slick with mud, and fumbled to keep all the apples in her basket. She’d timed her outing poorly, and now the rain had caught her still a twenty-minute walk from the house. Her mind truly was elsewhere these days.

“Miss Simmons!”

Mary Crawford had appeared in the doorway of the parsonage, waving to Jemma to approach.

“Confound it,” Jemma muttered, glancing the other way and wondering if she could pretend to not have seen nor heard.

“Miss Simmons, do come in! You’ll catch cold and then Mr. Fitz will never give me.”

Reluctantly, Jemma ducked under the roof above the small porch, cradling the basket to her chest. “I must bring these to Aunt Norris—“

“No, I will be selfish and keep you here to play with me!” Mary beamed, grabbing her by the hand and dragging her into the warmth of the parsonage.

Jemma had to admit, as Mary helped her out of her wet dress and into a simple gown – simple by Mary’s tastes, but still more expensive and finer by far than anything Jemma owned – that perhaps she’d been too hasty, in her protectiveness of Fitz, to judge Mary. She did display a certain tenderness of heart.

“You do have a fine form, my dear,” Mary said casually, as she did the lace up at the back of the gown. “No wonder Fitz delights so in sharing your company.”

“I imagine you would find little correlation between those circumstances,” Jemma murmured, glad her back was to the mirror so Mary wouldn’t see the blush spread up her chest.

The rain continued, and Mary had tea still hot from her earlier repast, so she made Jemma sit in the front room and warm her hands and throat while Mary plucked at a harp that occupied the majority of the space. She played beautifully, gently, with a rapturous expression, and Jemma felt herself moved – by the music, yes, but also with a pang of envy for the grace and the ease with which Mary was content in this circle, in this world, a world to which Jemma did not belong.

“That’s Fitz’s favorite,” Mary commented, when the last notes still hung in the air. “He seems very alive to music.”

“Yes, I suppose he is,” Jemma smiled, tracing a finger along the rim of her teacup. “He’ll certainly claim it arises from his interest in the physical properties of sound waves, but I suspect it’s something more human, more emotional, than all that.”

“Oh, physics,” Mary whispered, and shuddered slightly. “How dreary. All science, for that matter. I understand the importance, of course, being an educated woman myself, but it seems somehow the purview of dull, poor men on the Continent.”

With a fierce flare of defensiveness, Jemma informed her stiffly, “Fitz intends to make his life in science.”

Mary’s shock could not have been more apparent. “He – he does?” she spluttered, a hand to her breast. “I didn’t realize – he seems so _interesting_ , meant for far greater things that dark days spent in a laboratory burning his eyebrows off… A scientist’s wife… It is difficult to imagine something worse.”

“What profession would you suggest, Miss Crawford?” Fitz asked suddenly from the doorway, shaking water from his collar and hair. “I am not a firstborn.”

“There must be an – an uncle, to place you somewhere, surely?” Mary persisted, seemingly unflustered by what Fitz might’ve overheard.

“There is not.”

“Choose law, then!” Mary glanced to Jemma for support; finding none, she turned back to Fitz. “It is not too late for law.”

Jemma bowed her head, feeling as if she’d intruded in a marital spat. She understood Mary’s objections, knew them to be unfortunately prevailing in the society within which the Fitz family existed. But she also knew how much science meant to Fitz and that asking him to give it up was like asking her, Jemma, to give up writing, or telling her she must stop being friends with Fitz. It was tantamount to punishment.

“Oh look, the rain has stopped,” she said miserably, cutting Fitz off in a passionate analysis of the value of scientific research. “I must bring these apples to Aunt Norris – Fitz, will you accompany me?”

He was silent as they walked back together; this in itself was not uncharacteristic, but his stillness was paired with a gloominess that hurt Jemma as much as if she, herself, had been the subject of such personal abuse.

“Come now, chin up,” she teased gently, tossing an apple to him that he only just caught. “She _did_ say you’re meant for great things.”

“Like law? _Law_ , Simmons,” he groaned.

“She’ll come around,” she persisted, not fully believing herself. “Your logic and reason will win her over.”

His lips quirked and he glanced at her briefly, gratefully. “Would that more women were like you, Jemma.”

“No, you don’t. I irritate you. You’ve said it a million times.”

“Irritation is better than atrophy of the mind, certainly.” Linking his arm with hers, he gazed thoughtfully at the grounds ahead of them. “I must insist you save at least one dance for me tomorrow night.”

“Very well,” Jemma replied coolly, fighting a warm flutter of affection in her belly that threatened to overtake her. “We’ll see if you manage to keep up.”

 

 

 

 

The ball, even Jemma would concede, was lovely and tasteful to the highest degree. A string quarter in the far corner was into its second hour of flawless material, and every guest was dressed in their finest. Beside them, in a gown borrowed from Mary Crawford, Jemma felt like a shadow.

And yet, young men’s eyes followed her about the room, her step felt lighter than usual, and with the flush of rather strong punch, she felt only flattered, pleased, and (unfathomably) giggly.

“I do wonder why I am attracting so much attention,” she whispered to Fitz, who was standing stiffly beside her as they watched the dancers. “I can find no reason therefor.”

“There is every reason,” he returned, his eyes remaining trained on the room as she looked at him in surprise. “Your entire person is entirely agreeable.”

There it was again, that warm flutter – this time surely from the alcohol. Unsure how to respond, Jemma hummed and sipped her punch again. Any compliment from Fitz went to her head, but _agreeable_ was rather soft praise.

“Tonight,” she pronounced firmly, having reached the end of her drink, “I agree with _everyone_.”

She caught only the edge of Fitz’s doting smile as he took her empty glass, but it carried her as she floated away in search of a dance partner.

Mr. Crawford, it seemed, had been searching for her as well.

“You dance like an angel, Miss Simmons,” he murmured as they turned about, palms pressed together.

She smiled indulgently, the alcohol loosening her resistance to his normally insufferable attention. “I do not dance like an angel alone.”

“What?” Mr. Crawford laughed, even as he swept around to take her other hand. “A compliment? Heavens rejoice!”

They changed partners, as the dance required, pairing Mr. Crawford with his sister and Jemma with Fitz for their promised dance. The difference was instantly palpable: pleasant as Mr. Crawford was (under the right circumstances), with Fitz it was effortless, even if he did trip a bit over her dress. He made her laugh – entirely inappropriate – and turned his head towards her, somehow intimately, as if she was leading this dance, however the steps might disagree.

When he handed her back to Mr. Crawford, her gaze followed Fitz, lingering on the reflection of the lights off his hair and the way his hand curled into itself after he released hers.

But then he took Mary into his arms again, a pleased little blush spreading across his cheeks.

When Mr. Crawford leaned in ever so slightly to place a hand on Jemma’s lower back and elbow, she didn’t protest.

She wondered hazily if she was making a series of terrible decisions, if tonight’s camaraderie would cascade into situations from which it would be harder to extract herself. But then again, Fitz had Mary. Why shouldn’t she have someone who could make her feel that extraordinary?

 


	5. Chapter 5

In the weeks following the ball, Jemma found herself in unaccountably high spirits. Mr. Crawford was spending more and more time at Mansfield Park, and his presence did not cloud her days as she’d expected. On the contrary, he was pleasant without being too forward, and he served the additional purposes of stealing some of Mary’s attention from Fitz.

And Fitz had been noticeably attentive to Jemma as well, since the ball. He still took his daily walks about the grounds with Mary, instead of Jemma, but he always watched closely when Crawford was there, ready to intervene should Jemma display the slightest sign of distress. It was ridiculous, and unnecessary, but it was an endearing protectiveness that made Jemma lose her train of thought and her gaze linger on Fitz a moment too long.

One day, after an impassioned game of cards in which Jemma and Mr. Crawford resoundingly trounced Fitz and Mary, Crawford caught her on the stairs up to her room.

“Miss Simmons – Jemma,” he amended, dropping his voice to an undertone and lowering his eyes slightly. “You have by now, I am sure, heard that I have made Sir Thomas an offer for the parsonage?”

“I have,” she confirmed.

“I purported to desire to improve my intimacy with all of Mansfield Park, but I must confess – and I hope this comes as no great shock to you – I want to improve and perfect my intimacy with _you_.”

It shouldn’t have been a shock – all the signs had been there. But still, Jemma sucks in a shaky breath and steadies herself against the bannister. “Mr. Crawford—“

“I want to love and be loved,” he continued over her, eyes a little wild, moving up a step to come nearer to her.

“I’m flattered, sir, but I would request you to not speak nonsense, for fear you might someday convince yourself—”

“Jemma! You are _killing_ me,” Crawford groaned.

“Good day, sir,” she said hurriedly, and left him there on the stairs.

It wasn’t quite a marriage proposal, but it held the same magnitude. She’d grown too free with herself, taken advantage of her new position of some respect in the household, but it was time to rein that in.

The door to her room creaked behind her, and she turned quickly, thinking Fitz had come at just the moment she needed to speak to him, but instead it was Sir Thomas.

Jemma covered her pages of unfinished stories with a shawl. Never before had he deigned to enter her space: it must be part of his recent effort to appreciate Jemma now that he found her _worthy._

“Why is there no fire in your hearth?” he demanded without preamble.

“There is never a fire, sir.”

“It is always this cold and drafty here?” He glanced about in distaste, taking in the candle stubs by which she worked at night and the stacks of notes from her lessons with Fitz. “This simply will not do.”

“Your concern for my well-being is much appreciated, Sir Thomas, but I assure you I’m quite hardy and capable of enduring a little chill.”

“But you shouldn’t have to.” He frowned a moment longer, then turned to her and announced, “Henry Crawford has asked for your hand in marriage.”

Jemma sat down heavily on her bed with a sinking, sick feeling. She wasn’t entirely innocent, having led Crawford on to some agree, enjoying the attention and praise as well as the irritation their liaison caused Fitz and his jealous sisters – but she did not respect Crawford, nor did she believe his affection for her to be particularly deep.

And somehow, when she’d imagined the future, she’d always pictured leaving Mansfield Park. There was a beautiful cottage in Perthshire – she’d seen artist renderings of it in a newspaper Sir Thomas discarded – and if it should somehow be available, and affordable, she thought she might live there with— with--

“I cannot agree to marry him at this time,” she forced out.

“You do not know your own feelings,” Sir Thomas growled, expression turned suddenly thunderous. “I know you are not impervious to his charms; I have seen you delight in his presence, even seek it out on occasion. Has someone else declared his intentions for you?”

He was wrong, Jemma realized, her hands fisting in the material of her skirt. She _did_ know her own feelings. She’d known for some time and fought to change them, knowing it to be impossible. But the fact remained, she loved Fitz. Had always loved him, would always love him, though now in a new way. And she could never expect to find the same steady support, surprising laughter, and boundless affection in any other relationship.

But she could never have it. Already it had started to change. And she would’ve fought for it, said something to Fitz or further pursued this dastardly tack of making him jealous, if he did not so clearly desire Mary.

 “No, sir,” Jemma whispered, ducking her head to avoid his steely gaze.

“Then what is it?”

“His nature, sir, his manner – there is no sincerity, no depth, no original thought—” She tried to think of adjectives to use that were not simply the opposites of what she respected most in Fitz, but these contrasts came to her naturally.

And truthfully, even had Fitz not been in her life, Jemma expected she would’ve felt the same towards Mr. Crawford.

“You _will_ marry him,” Sir Thomas pronounced with finality.

Here it was. The perfect entry into their world of fine clothes and silver plates and balls every week. The only legitimate way they would accept her as an equal. For years she had maintained herself, held herself to her own standards instead of theirs and achieved to some degree, and finally _they_ were asking _her_ to join them. Ready for her on bended knee.

Quietly, with deadly calm, she looked up at him and whispered, “I will not, sir.”

 

 

 

What followed were some of the most unpleasant days Jemma had passed at Mansfield Park. Any moment she found herself in Sir Thomas’s presence he would fill with invectives, railing against her, scolding her as a disappointment, calling her independence offensive and pig-headed. He appealed to her sense of duty to her family – “He can make you secure as they never were” – and threatened to write to her mother and demand support for his position. It went on, and on, and on.

Once, as they sat taking tea at the back of the house, Jemma glanced over to where Fitz sat at a small distance, absorbed in a book. His eyes flicked up and caught hers, and he tried to look away but she was pleading silently with him and seemed unable to turn away.

But still he said nothing. She understood why: as with the affair with Sir Thomas’s slave holdings, Fitz believed he was protecting her. He believed that taking Crawford as a husband would be a wise decision.

And maybe, she thought with a softening of heart, he knew that she could fight her own battles.

Yet when she returned to her lonely room at night, no longer visited by her best friend and always on the verge of crying, she wished he’d speak up anyway.

Crawford wisely kept his distance, while Mary stayed near, ostensibly comforting Fitz through the family tension. The little spat over Fitz’s scientific attentions had apparently done nothing to lesson Mary’s obvious intentions at becoming a member of the family.

“All she needs is time,” Mary insisted gently, speaking across Fitz as the three sat in a window seat, Jemma studiously avoiding everyone else’s eyes. “He loves you, Jemma. If any man ever loved a woman forever, I think Henry would do as much for you.”

When Jemma looked up at Fitz, his mouth was twisted, caught between a smile and something less contented. She caught his hand where it was fidgeting at the buttons on his coat.

“Fitz?” she asked quietly, unable to take his silent acquiescence a moment longer. “What are your thoughts?”

He looked at her hand on his, his fingers looping over her thumb to pull it against his chest. His voice thick, he answered at last, “He chose you. What more evidence do you require that he has good character? He could make you very happy, Jemma, I’m sure of it, and – and he’d be lucky to have you.”

She withdrew her hand and began to cry, silently, because she could not rage as her heart wanted to, could not fly into fury in protest of the injustice they were perpetrating.  Because Fitz would drive her into another man’s arms in belief that it was best for her and that foolishness only made her love him more.

“I think it should be acknowledged that a man need not be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself,” she ground out.

“Perhaps you would rather return to your home?” Sir Thomas roared, standing from his seat near the fire. “I can write to your mother tonight. Some abstinence from the luxuries of Mansfield Park might bring you to your senses. Is that your choice?”

It had been years since Jemma had gone home. She did not know if her family would recognize her, or love her, or if she’d be as much a stranger there as she often felt here.

“Yes,” she admitted, the exhaustion of battling to be heard overtaking her. “It is.”

Fitz turned towards her abruptly, brow furrowed, looking personally affronted as if he’d be abandoning her, though to him this was still home. “Why, Jemma?”

Keeping her voice low, knowing Fitz to be the only one worthy of an explanation, Jemma murmured, “To be at home again, to be loved by my own family, to feel affection without fear or restraint – and to feel myself equal to those around me—“

“You have never judged yourself by the opinions of others, Jemma,” Fitz whispered.

“I know my own value, Fitz. But that does not make me immune to the judgment of those I once hoped to consider family,” she said softly.

He drew away from her, face crumpling with some private devastation, and Jemma nearly considered agreeing to marry Crawford on the spot, if only to make Fitz look at her again, smile again. But love of another, however powerful and healing and buoyant, could not be allowed to supersede love of herself.

She was to leave the next day.


	6. Chapter 6

None of the others came out to see Jemma off, a situation understandable given the high tension under which she left, but it still pained her, inexplicably, innately, to see Sir Thomas merely glance out the sitting room window and move on.

So only Mary and Fitz were audience to her departure, Mary with a face of compassionate endurance and Fitz with his head ducked slightly, some emotion flitting over his face at odd moments. He’d been silent at breakfast and had to excuse himself before the meal was finished, setting down his tea too sharply and hurrying off looking positively heartsick.

She was deserting him exactly when he’d need her guidance with Mary, she presumed to be the trouble. She hoped he would find a way to forgive her.

As the moment neared, Fitz broke away from Mary and came to stand with Jemma, somewhat facing her and somewhat beside her. They watched her valises being loaded onto the carriage in silence, and then Fitz wiped his hands on his trousers, and Jemma glanced at him and opened her mouth to speak, but his hand reached for her waist and drew her to him, embracing her as they’d not done since they were small children.

She clung to him, not caring that dozens of eyes were judging them from the manor, wanting only to memorize the tension of his shoulders through his overcoat and the pressure of his hands on her back, his chin propped against her shoulder and the material of his collar scratching her cheek.

They parted too soon and too quickly, standing unnaturally far apart as they recalled their manners. Mary was dutifully studying her shoes, giving them their moment, and Jemma had never felt more warmth towards this woman who was otherwise an intruder in their friendship.

“I hope you know—“ she started, voice too high, and Fitz glanced up at her, eyes wide. “I hope you know how much I  – I shall—” Words were supposed to be her safe haven, but her lips were trembling and his gaze was so expectant and she would do anything to meet those expectations if she only knew what they were. “…How much I shall write to you,” she finished weakly.

He blinked, nodded, and leaned back on his heels, and then she was crying in earnest. Fitz moved towards her but Mary swept between them as was only proper, cradling Jemma against her bosom and making soft, calming sounds.

“Who says we shall not still be sisters?” Mary whispered, pulling back to cradle Jemma’s face in both hands. “I hope when we meet again it is under that happy union.”

When the carriage at last rolled out, Jemma still wiping hot, stinging tears off her cheeks, Fitz was watching her go, and Mary was watching him.

 

 

The countryside was almost entirely unchanged since her first momentous ride, so many years before. She couldn’t mark the moment they crossed into England, but the first time she saw the sea, so gloomy in its iron-grey and deep blue, the sight filled her, touched some forgotten spot of life and joy and sustenance she’d experienced so infrequently at Mansfield.

The door to her family home likewise looked the same, red but faded, though maybe the handle had been changed once or twice in the intervening time. She knocked with a gloved hand, feeling her distance from the excited little girl who’d bounded off this stoop one morning and trying to ignore the knots binding her stomach; she needed this, needed her family to love her and for herself to love this place as she once had, for it was possibly all she had left.

Her mother opened the door, a baby on her hip whom Jemma didn’t recognize.

“Oh my – is that – Jemma?” her mother asked faintly.

“Hello, mum,” she managed, mustering a smile.

“Well, that’s—“ She glanced over Jemma’s red traveling coat and the band holding back her curls, and if Jemma had been hoping for a hug or a smile or some tears (she had), she quickly realized it would not be forthcoming. “Come in, of course, dear. Charlie! Betsy! Come see your sister!”

The kitchen was, as she remembered, grungy and cold, despite the fireplace, and loud with dozens of children, some of whom she’d not ever even met, though she assumed they must be relatives.

“How long are you to stay?” her mother demanded, sweeping dirty bowls from the table.

“I— It’s hard to say,” she admitted, thrown by the chaos.

“Mum, dad won’t—” Skye came flying down the steps, nearly crashing into the far wall in her haste. Then she caught sight of Jemma and drew up sharply. “Oh, _Jemma_!”

Their reunion was tearful and without the jealousy Jemma felt emanating from her mother, and her heart soared to find that it was as if not a day has passed, excepting Skye’s height and beauty and spunk all having exceeded what she would’ve thought possible. She couldn’t stop herself hugging her over and over.

“Well, well, the prodigal daughter,” her father chuckled, stumping slowly after Skye. The kerchief about his neck looked like it’d not been washed in several years and he smelled so of drink Jemma took a step back. Still, she’d known when she’d decided to come home that there would be challenges, that she’d find her own manners sometimes at odds with those of her family, but -- "Go on, then, have a turn, let’s have a look at ye.” Her father made a spinning motion with his finger. “See what you’ve become.”

She turned slowly on the spot, and halfway around she realized it was exactly what Sir Thomas had once had her do, as he appraised her, as he decided he loved her more than he once had because she’d grown beautiful and worthy of his esteem.

She cried that night, muffling the sound in her pillow, but she was sharing a bed with Skye and couldn’t hide the shaking. Skye curled around her, kissing her shoulder, and held her until she slept again.

In the ensuing days, as Jemma became reacquainted with the dull knives and the dim light through unwashed windows and the entire lack of privacy, Skye remained her dearest companion, joking with her under her breath and sneaking away to lay on their bed and listen to Jemma read sheaves and sheaves of stories she’d been saving for the occasion.

Letters arrived from Mansfield – all from Mary – with updates on Julia and Mariah and Mr. Rushworth, and the occasional comment on growing “sensitive to Fitz’s charms.” Skye saw how Jemma reacted to these letters, how she grew distant, and she expertly redirected.

“Tell me more about this Henry Crawford,” she pleaded, flopping against Jemma’s side. “What’s he like?”

“A rake. I think,” Jemma admitted, nose wrinkled. She hadn’t quite pinned down her impression of Mr. Crawford, even if she did remain unwilling to marry him.

“Yes _please_ ,” Skye purred.

Jemma laughed and tugged affectionately on her sister’s hair. “Men like Henry Crawford are far more amusing in literature than real life, Skye, I’ll beg you to remember that.”

“Does he make your toes warm?” Skye quizzed, a wide grinning revealing how much she delighted in having someone around to torture this way. “Do you flush at the very sight of him? Does he bring you flowers?”

“He has yet to do anything remotely worthy of such acclaim.”

As if on cue, the next morning two messenger boys delivered a cart of fireworks, a flurry of pigeons, and a hand organ, all presented in alarming fashion just after dawn.

“It’s ridiculous,” Jemma snorted.

“It’s romantic!” Skye wheedled.

There was no note with it, no accompanying message, and she had to admit, as she lay back in bed some minutes later trying to find sleep again, that the gesture itself was not totally unwelcome, were it to be sent from the right person.

And then Henry Crawford was there, in her hometown, standing in the street outside their church one day, and the niggling little hope she’d been nursing since the doves wilted. She kept a straight face, though, as he greeted her parents, charmed them gently, offered a sweet to the young siblings. He’d played them properly so that she’d have no reason to deny him a private audience, which he did, walking several meters behind the rest of the family as they walked along the water back to their house.

“How is everyone at Mansfield?” Jemma heard herself say with acceptable civility.

“Fitz is well.”

“I—“

“I know, Jemma,” he interrupted her gently.

“Know what?” she demanded, indignant on her own behalf, that he’d visit her after he’d been the reason she was virtually expelled from Mansfield, that he’d presume to know anything about her.

“You love Fitz. And he is a fine, worthy man, in his own … peculiar way, but he is to be married to my sister.”

She’d kept her face steady through the beginning of his accusation, but her hand flew to her stomach and she ceased to walk as he ended, wishing Skye were beside her for a steadying arm.

“The words have been spoken?”

“All but.”

Setting her jaw, she moved forward again, quickly enough she could almost hope to lose him. “I shall wait to grieve until then.”

He caught her wrist. “Jemma, you must grieve now, and spare your heart more weeks of agony. Please,” he breathed, squeezing her hands between his. “Jemma, I know you are infinitely superior to me in character, in morality, in wit, in every way. Your eyes, they are so clear and unflinching – please just look at me again, see me _changed_ , Jemma. I have changed, and I will wait until the end of time to prove it to you if I must.”

“Senseless as it is,” Jemma murmured, a million shards of panic piercing her lungs, desperation bubbling up to be anywhere but here, “my heart is still full of another.”

He released her, face only sympathetic. “I shall wait, then. Until it is free once more.”

She could almost want it, she thought when she’d found a seat outside in the cold yard where her family wouldn’t follow her and she could think and suffer in peace. She almost wanted to love someone who wanted her, instead of someone she could never have. And maybe he _had_ changed. Or maybe she’d long misjudged him, blinded as she was by misplaced affection.

The letters from Mary continued, without intimating the exact stage of her courtship with Fitz, but from his quarter there was not a word. Jemma assumed the two were related, his silence a sign that he was occupied elsewhere, and every day she expected to receive confirmation of their nuptials.

And when she finally broke, when she stood on a windy dune and let another cheery letter from Mary drop from her hand and blow out to the surf, Henry was there beside her to muffle her sobs against his chest.

She fell into accepting him, hardly noticing as she did so. She had given up, at last, far too late, and she needed someone, needed someone to need her. The smell of the harbor had turned sour, the boats mocked her thirst for freedom, and the poverty became oppressive. Her mother, not totally blind to the situation, whispered one night when the other children had already taken to sleep, “Remember, Jemma, _I_ married for love. Wealth need not be out of the question for _you_.”

So she accepted him. There was no repeated proposal, no more romantic gesture, she merely announced she’d resigned herself to him – if not in those words, of course. Henry Crawford was her first kiss, on a pier in mid-winter, Skye at the end tending to a younger brother and shielding her eyes for a better look as a joyful Crawford spun her round and round.

She did not sleep a moment that night.

“I cannot marry you. Not – not now, in any event,” she blurted the moment he entered the kitchen the next morning. The bouquet of flowers he’d been sunnily wielding before him drooped to his side.

“When might you be prepared?” he asked hoarsely.

“I cannot say.” She wouldn’t apologize for her feelings, wouldn’t beg for his forgiveness, but still she tried to soften her tone, tried to convey with her hands fretting at her neck and her eyes mournful that she regretted any pain she might cause.

“Why might that be?” A change had come over him, in just the moment since they’d begun speaking. His eyes burned, his nostrils flared, and as he took a step towards her Jemma thought not for the first time how dangerous it was to be a woman with an opinion.

“I – I still doubt you—” she admitted.

“ _Doubt_ me? Doubt _me?_ ” he roared, and the flowers soared across the room into the hearth. “ _You_ are hardly the standard of trust and constancy, Jemma Simmons! If you will spurn me, at least have the decency to admit your own weakness and foolishness. Don’t put this on _me_.”

She made to run after him but caught herself on the doorframe. Prostrating herself at his mercy would not fix anything, only imply his rectitude, something she certainly did not intend to support.

“You were right,” Skye observed bitterly, looping her arm through Jemma’s and watching Crawford storm down the street in his ridiculous blue velvet waistcoat. “He wasn’t amusing _at all_. Good riddance, I say.”

 

After rejecting Crawford – though not definitively, she reminded herself gloomily; perhaps he would still love her, and she would learn to do the same – Jemma relinquished herself to life with her family. It was a re-education process of sorts, with shock and discomfort and stops and starts not unlike those she’d first experienced at Mansfield. She tucked her nicer dresses away, kept her nails short to minimize the necessity for cleaning dirt out from under them, and learned to suppress the shudder that overcame her every time her mother served meat stew that was more fat than meat.

No loss was greater, though, than finding she couldn’t write. She even tried to add to the chronicles of Fitz and Simmons, the illustrious detectives, but found it too painful and her ideas too flat, too somber. She eventually hid her papers as well. Writing was a silly pursuit for someone in her situation, anyway.

 

 

 

“Jemma love, visitor!” her mother called from below.

Henry had returned, she thought in panic as she straightened from changing the upstairs linens. It had been weeks since their fight and still she hadn’t determined how to feel about him. Well, she knew _how_ she felt about him, but she hadn’t parsed out whether she could choose to feel differently, or choose to ignore her feelings, or—

Still mulling for an answer, she descended the stairs in her apron, hair slightly matted with sweat—

And there, standing in her family kitchen, as she’d so often imagined, looking much less out of place than Henry and smiling tremulously as her eyes found his, was Fitz.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you need a fic to help you remember that Leopold Fitz is the best damn man in any universe, THIS IS IT. YOU WILL FIND SOLACE. HE IS A GEM. (Ha. Jem.)

In the manner that is only possible when one has memorized another’s features so thoroughly as to note the slightest change, to feel the slightest shift as if it occurred on one’s own person, Jemma examined Fitz’s face for news of how he’d fared these weeks without her. His hair had grown out a bit, like there’d been no one to remind him to keep it properly trimmed, and he twisted the brim of a hat through his hands as he spoke. But he’d still managed to buckle his shoes and his cravat was actually straight, so despite hints of fraying at his personal edges, her fears that he’d have fallen apart completely were allayed. Fitz had always been stronger than that, in a quiet, unexpected way.

But his eyes – there was a glorious light to them she’d missed, something eager and innocent even in his mature face (had his brow always been so strong?), an openness she’d never known in others.

She nearly sobbed right there in her family’s kitchen, so deeply did his presence affect her, yanking loneliness from her chest so sharply it wanted to cave inwards, to crush her heart as it struggled to master grief and relief all at once.

“I’ve come to take you back to Mansfield,” Fitz was saying. “Your assistance, your support, is needed there. Tom – Tom was being Tom, and he fell ill, and his friends abandoned him, every last one leaving him for dead. It looks grave, and we – we must hurry. If you – if you wish to, that is,” he finished, his uncertainty writ clear to one so practiced in reading his most minute of expressions.

Leaving Mansfield hadn’t been about Fitz. Nor would her return be. But their separation – its length, its tenor, its desperate emptiness – had clarified for her that she could find reasons to be unhappy at Mansfield, and she could find reasons to be unhappy with her family, but Fitz was a rare reason to be happy anywhere.

Skye was the only reason she might’ve hesitated, and of course she wished Jemma off with the most brilliant of smiles despite their tears, both promising they would see each other soon.

Jemma had made the journey now twice, once in excitement for adventures to come and once in despair over ties severed, but never had the carriage felt so stifling. She had Fitz again, or he had her – regardless, they were together, but they sat in silence but for the horses’ hooves, the air thick with things unsaid. She’d expect this sort of awkwardness from Fitz, not from herself.

“I trust you are well, excepting this business with Tom?” she broached at last, glancing his way but finding his profile against the window too maddening and looking away again. “With your – with your research, and your personal endeavors? Miss Crawford is—”

“Mary is fine, Jemma,” he cut her off. “I understand Henry Crawford paid you a visit?”

 _Mary is fine. Mary is fine? Mary is **fine**. _ He couldn’t have said something more ambiguous and certain to drive her mad. But he was still calling her Mary, not Miss Crawford, so there was a certain degree of familiarity, one might even dare say intimacy—“Yes.”

“Was he… attentive?”

Jemma’s chest constricted with affection for his concern for her, though she feared it was the concern of a brother or dear friend, not a jealous lover.

“Yes, very,” she replied cautiously.

“And has your heart changed towards him?”

_Will my answer change your heart towards me? Are you asking because you want to help prepare the linens for the wedding bed, or do you fear the answer as much as I fear your reaction?_

“Yes,” she admitted at last, seeking shelter in vague honesty. “Several times.”

He nodded sharply, looking somewhere down around her shoes.

“I find—” She felt a need to justify something to him. No, not justify – Fitz would never expect that from her, nor would she ever feel the need to give it. But in the few weeks they’d been apart, she felt she’d lived a lifetime, and there was no one she wanted to discuss it with more than Fitz, no one’s opinion she valued more. “I find that I – I find—”

“Jemma,” he sighed, a strange pained tightness about his eyes, “surely you and I are beyond speaking when words are clearly not enough.”

He looked back out the window, the half of his face she could still see washed in grey sunlight, and she felt irrationally, fondly angry with him, because she wanted to speak, to make up for all the letters they’d promised to exchange and hadn’t—

And then Fitz whispered, as if to the curtains framing the carriage window, “I missed you.”

Jemma’s eyes fluttered shut. She felt a great release, knowing that he too had been carrying a phantom limb – a phantom person – about since they’d parted, that whatever the nature of his affection for her it was in every aspect as deep and brilliant as hers for him.  

“And I you,” she returned.

A soft pressure on her hand where it rested on the bench between them snapped her eyes open; Fitz slipped his hand over hers, slowly as if waiting for her to withdraw, and when she didn’t he clasped it against his thigh, a little more firmly than necessary, a little more dearly than was proper.

Jemma had to steady herself with her other hand on the wall of the carriage. Fitz’s palm over her knuckles was somehow more startling, more affecting, more alluring than any of Crawford’s kisses.

Fitz fell asleep an hour later, sliding sideways across the back of the bench so that his head slipped first to Jemma’s shoulder, then so his cheek rested precariously against her bosom. She knew she should push him away, tilt him up gently without waking him. But she had undertaken her fair share of selfless acts. She deserved to close her eyes for a moment and imagine a different life, imagine they were FitzSimmons, master detectives, returning home from another cracked case, the slightly embellished, fictionalized account of their adventures she’d inevitably draft already spinning itself in her head.

In another lifetime, maybe.

 

 

Jemma’s return to Mansfield Park, which she’d braced herself against in expectation of resistance and difficulty and brittle exchanges, went largely without notice, overshadowed as the house was by Tom’s sickness. It didn’t look good: even without medical experience, Jemma could feel the heaviness in his hand when she took it in greeting; he never seemed to stop sweating; and when he wasn’t coughing, he was wretching into a basin beside the bed.

The others fled, his father and mother and sisters flitting in to express their concern for mere minutes in the day, so Jemma remained with Tom, and by extension with Fitz, as they changed his sheets, brought fresh water, wiped his brows and opened or closed the curtains as he feebly requested. The doctor visited every day, but he reported that so long as Tom took his medicine and remained on bed rest, there was nothing more to do but wait. In her frustration, and in her pride at how seamlessly she and Fitz worked, even here in this new realm, she nearly commented that perhaps he should consider becoming a doctor of medicine rather than of experimental sciences. But his face was heavy with tending for his brother, and the joke turned tasteless and ashy on her tongue.

The Crawfords, too, came to pay their respects, staying in the house to support the family as best they could (without entering the sickroom, of course). Jemma passed Henry once on the stairs, carrying warm milk up for Fitz, and spared him barely a glance. It fell to him to repair things between them, if such a reparation could at all be desired by either party.

She felt, in a strange way that made her feel selfish for thinking it, finally needed at Mansfield Park. Fitz would’ve been left alone to the tending without her, and he’d’ve forgotten to sleep if she’d not forced him to it.

Though, to be fair, she wouldn’t have slept either, did he not come in and find her elbows slipping off the bedside table as she tried to keep herself upright.

“I’m up now, it’s fine—” she protested weakly as he bundled her out of the room.

“You look like the walking dead,” he informed her wryly. “The really lovely, helpful, forgiving walking dead,” he amended hastily at her expression of bleary disgruntlement.

“I’m about to look like your worst nightmare,” she muttered, but she did as he bade and went upstairs to change into her nightgown. After a moment’s thought, she stole down to the kitchens (tiptoeing past Tom’s room lest Fitz catch her still on her feet) for a cup of tea to fight back the chill of her attic rooms.

On her way back up, she stilled in the dim front room. Sir Thomas had fallen asleep in one of the armchairs, and the table lamp beside him was the last light in the room. There was papers and artifacts scattered about, and as Jemma drew near she perceived that he’d finally set about unpacking one of the trunks Tom had brought back from the Caribbean. There was a line of shells next to his feet, a sketchy map tossed aside, something woven from grass, and, on the table, a sketchbook, delicate lines just peeking out—

Jemma hitched the shawl about her shoulders so she could cradle her tea in the crook of one elbow and pick the sketchbook up. She hadn’t known Tom had an artistic bent.

Then she saw the sketches, and something curdled in her stomach. Page after page of contrasted figures – the light ones drawn tall and proud, the others shaded in and drawn to grotesque caricature. Slaves, she could tell, from the disgusting cartoons the more conservative papers still published. Slaves from Sir Thomas’s holdings in the Caribbean. But not only were the depictions alarming in and of themselves, but the scenes: rapes, beatings, hangings. And in every picture, the white men stood straight, faces peaceful.

The man in the final sketch was unmistakeably Sir Thomas, standing over a black woman with his trousers undone.

“ _What in the hell do you think you’re doing, bitch?”_

Jemma dropped the sketchbook and her tea as she leapt; hot water and glass hit her bare feet but it was nothing to the fury on Sir Thomas’s face as he rose from the armchair and started towards her.

“This – this is beyond anything I’ve—”

“Those are _private_ ,” he bellowed.

“If all your private sins are this appalling, even God shall not have mercy,” Jemma snapped, the last bit of any willingness to grovel having shattered on the floor with her mug.

“ _GET OUT!”_

She couldn’t be sure, at this point, whether he meant the room or the house, but she wouldn’t risk being alone with this man a moment longer, so she fled up the stairs, adrenaline and fury and confusion and despair carrying her. Those images needed to be published, of that she was sure. So long as they were kept hidden men like Sir Thomas would continue with this most inhumane of trades, and she couldn’t for a minute more be a party to this, even in the most tangential of ways… She should’ve done something years ago. She’d be banned from every household of any standing but it hardly seemed a loss.

The light in the sitting room next to Tom’s bed chambers was on – Fitz had finally come to his senses and accepted he could rest a moment – she’d just look in on him, his presence would calm her—

But the man on the couch wasn’t Fitz, and he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t clothed. Neither of them were.

“Oh!” Jemma squeaked, before she could help herself, and Henry Crawford’s head whipped to look at her just as Mariah – _Mrs._ Mariah Rushworth – dragged a pillow over her bare chest. “ _Oh_ ,” she repeated, feeling herself flush as she very much did _not_ look at all the exposed skin, and then she tumbled back out the door and into Tom’s room.

Fitz looked up as she entered, hands falling away from his pale, drained face.

“Jemma?”

“Fitz, I—” She didn’t know where to start, so she just flailed hopelessly as he stood from the loveseat by the window and moved to her, catching her alarm. At last she simply gestured to the next room.

With a frown, Fitz disappeared into the hallway. She heard the door open to the sitting room, several low, panicked voices – Fitz didn’t speak – and then he was back, fingers scrambling his vest open, eyes slightly wild with anger.

“Seriously?” he choked out indignantly, striding past her. “The last thing I’ve ever _wanted_ to do was be the only sane one in this family, but the way everyone goes about flippantly chasing their every bloody whim and desire --  and with Tom, the next room over!”

Jemma sank into the loveseat, a trembling hand over her lips, and Fitz stopped talking at once.

“S-sorry,” he muttered, briefly planting his hands on his hips before joining her on the sofa, sitting closer than necessary. “I didn’t think – Crawford – of course you’ll be—”

In the mess of it all – the drawings, the writhing naked bodies, and now, truth be told, Fitz’s proximity – she’d honestly not given a thought to this persistent notion of his that she harbored feelings for Henry Crawford and might be personally hurt by his little tryst. But Fitz, ever the gentleman even as he shook with anger, had taken her feelings into account before she’d done so for herself.

He wrapped a consoling arm about her shoulders to draw her to him, to rest her head on his shoulder, his free hand at the back of her head, and he cradled her with an unbearable tenderness so at odds with the set of his jaw and the tension in his body. _She_ should be consoling _him_ , and yet here he was, channeling his fury into something healing, soothing, supportive.

A better man in the universe could not exist.

Fitz exhaled shakily, seeming to will himself to calm down, and turned his head a fraction to kiss her hairline lingeringly, gratefully.

She tilted her up to him, on instinct, his lips brushing across her forehead before he drew back slightly to look at her, the hand from the back of her head ghosting down to her jaw.

“You alright?” he whispered.

His thumb stroked her chin, which was trembling now, but not because of Crawford.

She nodded, but he searched her face for further confirmation. Flustered and overwhelmed by his care, she looked down a bit, fingers she hadn’t realized she’d brought to his face now curling over his ear, and they drifted together effortlessly. Drifted until his nose brushed her cheek and she could feel his every exhale on her lips and they leaned in a bit farther –

They both gasped, realization of what they were about to do striking simultaneously, and they jerked backwards to opposite ends of the loveseat. Jemma pressed her hands to her burning cheeks, then to her neck, as she frantically waited for a cue from Fitz, who was staring at her with his mouth slightly ajar.

From the bed, Tom coughed violently, and Fitz started.

“Jemma, I’m – I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have—” he breathed, and then he was gone, up off the sofa and out of the room.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

The story was already in the London papers delivered the morning after next. Julia read to the family, assembled gravely in the sitting room, of the Mansfield scandal, the eldest daughter fled with a man other than her husband. There was no mention of Mr. Rushworth, but the story could only have come from him.

Everyone was silent for a while after. Aunt Norris and Sir Thomas seemed to be in shock; Fitz, seated as far as possible along the sofa away from Jemma, had a thumb pressed to his lips and was staring at the cold hearth. They’d not spoken beyond a few niceties since their intimate moment in Tom’s sickroom, but she noticed – perhaps reading meaning where there was none – that he appeared to be avoiding Mary as much as herself.

Mary spoke now, the first to break the shocked stillness. “The fools! Under this roof! They should’ve known Rushworth would do something rash.”

Jemma’s brow contracted. She knew it wasn’t her place; she wasn’t part of the family – and yet—“Under which roof would it have been better?”

Mary sighed, the very picture of pained patience. “I understand your bitterness, but don’t direct it towards me, Miss Simmons.”

“At present, you are the closest representation of the guilty parties,” Jemma shot back. Beside her, Fitz shifted uncomfortably, but she plowed forward. “Of course you are not accountable for your brother’s actions, but you have known better than we do of his capricious nature.”

“He is weak, yes,” Mary acknowledged, rising from her chair near the window. “But he means well. His heart is too soft.” Jemma rolled her eyes, but the attention of every other person in the room was on Mary, who spoke with increasing assuredness. “You are a family in distress, but you must recover and rise gracefully. It is the only hope. Consider also that if Henry does not marry Mariah, and if you also reject her, she will be an outcast.”

Julia squeaked and Aunt Morris crossed herself.

“But we _can_ recover. Here is my proposal: we use every method at our disposal to persuade Henry to marry Mariah, making honest people out of them both once more. After a suitable period of time has passed, Fitz and I will accept them into our acquaintance and our household.”

Jemma couldn’t stop herself from looking too quickly at Fitz; had a marriage proposal already been tendered? Surely he would have said something to her – surely, after their near-miss moment just two nights before, he wouldn’t –

His eyebrows had scrunched in on themselves, his shoulders creeping upwards, but he was still looking at the carpet, not at her, not at Mary.

After a beat, Jemma turned back to Mary. “Such a developed strategy, Miss Crawford. And how would a poor scientist afford the status requisite for this plan to succeed?”

Mary tilted her head ever so slightly, looking gravely around at them all. “Chance is not _always_ unkind.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If it should occur that Tom does not recover, Fitz will be the heir. And wealth and consequence could fall into hands no more deserving,” Mary finished beneficently, beaming at Fitz.

Beside her, Jemma felt Fitz stiffen, just as anger and disbelief curdled in her gut.

Unaware of the reaction to her little speech, Mary continued to slink about the parlor like she already owned the house. Jemma wouldn’t have been surprised to see her call in a maid to reupholster the chairs.

“It’s difficult to say such things, of _course_ , but one must prepare oneself for these eventualities. I speak only what needs must be done, not what I feel.”

This time Fitz looked up and sat forward, rage palpably emanating off of him, but Jemma slid next to him and laid a hand on his knee to stay him.

With a shaking voice, Jemma warned, “You may want to reconsider your eagerness for Tom’s death.”

“And you should consider your thinly veiled disdain towards _me_ , Miss Simmons!” All trace of friendship between them was gone; Jemma thought back to her initial distrust of Mary Crawford and how hard she’d worked to like her, for Fitz’s sake, but the pale, wide-eyed woman standing above her with her hands in fists was unrecognizable. “Need I remind you that if you had accepted my brother as you ought, you might now be on the verge of marriage, and Henry wouldn’t have needed to take up with Mariah again!”

Jemma opened her mouth, but Fitz shot to his feet, nearly sending Jemma tumbling to the floor in his haste.

“You will _not_ accuse Jemma of any guilt in this fracas!” he spluttered. “Your startling adaptability to my brother’s possible demise sends a child through my heart. You cheerfully plan parties with his money, which is not now nor will _ever_ be yours. You attack Jemma for following her own infallible guide in matters of the heart. You treat my family like so many unwelcome visitors in _your_ estate – All this has convinced me I have been a blind fool to seek any connection with you. You are a stranger to me, Miss Crawford. I do not know you and I have no wish to.”

Jemma gaped up at him, utterly flabbergasted. Never, even in their youthful days of roughhousing and playacting, had she heard Fitz speak so vehemently and at such length in one go.

“And another – another thing,” he went on, his voice now lowering, suddenly anxious. “I’m _glad_ Jemma didn’t accept Henry Crawford, whatever mess might’ve grown out of it in the end. Because if she’d married him, I’d never – I’d never have forgiven myself… for pushing her away.”

The third, or fourth, or fifth stunned silence of the morning followed this pronouncement.

“That’s just – that’s all I wanted to say,” Fitz muttered, and then he was fleeing the room.

All eyes turned back to Jemma, even Mary, who by all accounts should have been bodily removed from the property by this point.

And then—

“Excuse me,” Jemma breathed.

Fitz was already thundering across the grounds on his horse by the time she was outside. It had been months since she’d ridden – being too occupied with her trip home and Tom’s illness – and her hands shook as she struggled with the saddle, before she abandoned the thing entirely and threw herself upon the horse’s bare back.

She caught up to him under a flowering tree on the outskirts of the Mansfield grounds, his horse tied up a short distance away. He looked up at the pounding of her horse’s hooves, rose from the little stone bench on which he’d been brooding, then sat down again heavily.

“Fitz!” Jemma panted, tumbling off and rushing to him. “You have to stop running away!”

“I’m sorry, Jem, I didn’t mean to—” He winced and rubbed a hand over his eyes as she sat beside him. “I shouldn’t have done that. Any of that.”

“Whatever you think you said in there, you really didn’t say much of anything,” Jemma chuckled, her heart racing far past what it should be after such a short ride. “I know words are more _my_ terrain, but I could greatly benefit from some clarification.”

“Just – just give me a minute,” he muttered.

She nodded and held her tongue, as much as she feared their moment might slip away again. Giving him as much privacy as she could, given their position, she looked out over the fields to where the sunlight shimmered on a small pond.

At last Fitz spoke, sounding choked. “I’ve loved you all my life.”

Jemma closed her eyes, not daring to hope. “I know, Fitz,” she replied softly.

“No, Jemma, I mean – I mean that to, but – but as a man loves a woman, or a hero loves a heroine.”

She finally looked at him, finding every ounce of her own breathless, anxious desperation reflected back at her. “Oh, Fitz,” she whispered. She wanted to put her hands somewhere – his hair? His face? His shoulders? – and settled for smoothing the front of his shirt. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

He hung his head so his curls nearly brushed her chin. “At first I felt foolish, to think of you like that. Then I felt too selfish – I knew for the family, I must choose Mary – and then when I realized it was impossible, that I could never l-love another, I thought it too late—”

“No, never too late,” she pleaded, and Fitz’s head shot up, his hands closing around hers tenderly.

“I have been so anxious to do what is _right_ that I have failed to do what I _feel_ is right. But if you choose me, after all my blundering – it would – oh, god, Jemma, it would be a happiness which no description could reach.”

“Oh, Fitz,” Jemma repeated, breathless, and then their trembling lips met, and met, and met, as they cradled each other in the impossible preciousness of the moment.  

“I have no money,” Fitz panted when they parted, and Jemma laughed, toying with his collar. “But we can move to London, you can write – newspapers, or books, I don’t know, we’ll find a way to publish them, I’ll work any job I can find if it means you can write – your sister can join us—”

“You’ve met her all of once!” Jemma chortled.

“But you love her,” Fitz said fiercely, but it was a passion like smoldering coals as he wiped the tears from her cheeks with both thumbs. “And therefore I love her.”

It was impossible, Jemma knew, with so much uncertainty still ahead of them, but as she hugged Fitz against her, she thought that even on her most transcendent days of joy, her heart had never been this full.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all folks!! :D :D :D


End file.
